Strategic Release Manager

About the Role:

We are seeking a seasoned DevOps Program Manager to oversee and drive the end-to-end software release quality process across our product portfolio.

This role ensures that every software release meets defined quality and reliability benchmarks while enabling smooth, predictable, and efficient release management practices.

The ideal candidate will lead cross-functional initiatives across Product management, engineering, QA, Ops and Release teams to accelerate delivery, improve reliability and secure scalable deployments across our SaaS platforms.

• Release Program Leadership: Own and drive strategic DevOps programs across product teams, ensuring alignment with business goals and delivery timelines. Stand up and run end-to-end program plans for release trains across products/environments, create integrated roadmaps, manage critical paths and risks.
• Release Management Plan (Program Layer): Operationalize the Release Management Process environment promotion strategy (Dev→QA→UAT→Prod), approvals, rollback plans, and audit trails.
• CI/CD Governance: Oversee the implementation and optimization of continuous integration and delivery pipelines, ensuring automation and traceability.
• Cross-Functional Stakeholder Collaboration: Act as a liaison between engineering, operations, product, and leadership teams to ensure transparency and accountability on release timelines, quality. Drive release communications on progress, risks, and release validations.
• Release Quality and Compliance: Collaborate with Engineering and QE teams to develop and enforce testing standards and acceptance criteria to meet release functional & non-functional requirements as per organizational policies, security & regulatory requirements.
• Manage Risks and Issues: Proactively identify risks that could impact release scope, quality, or schedule and develop mitigation plans. Coordinate with release engineers on code merges, branch ramifications, and manage dependencies.
• Release Metrics & Continuous Improvement: Define and track release KPIs related to deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and system uptime. Conduct Release retrospectives to gather feedback, identify lessons learned, and drive process improvement.

• At least 15 years of experience in program/project management in software with demonstrable ownership of cross-functional release, DevOps or operations programs.
• Experience managing multiple parallel releases and coordinating distributed teams is essential.
• 10+ years of experience in DevOps, software engineering release management, or infrastructure roles, with at least 3 years in program or project management.
• Proven experience managing large-scale DevOps initiatives in a SaaS environment.
• Strong understanding of cloud platforms (Azure, AWS), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, ARM templates), release and project management tools (e.g., Jira, Jenkins, Git, CI/CD platforms).
• Solid understanding of the software development lifecycle, version control, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and automation tools.
• Familiarity with project management methodologies, Agile, Scrum, and SAFe methodologies.
• Excellent verbal & written communication, leadership, and team member management skills - ability to lead without authority, influence stakeholders, resolve conflicts, and motivate change.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field.

• Act with integrity. We are transparent and have the courage to do the right thing.
• Work together to win together. We believe collaboration is the catalyst that unlocks our full potential.
• Innovate with purpose. We shape the market with big ideas that drive big outcomes.
• Respect all voices. We embrace differences and foster a culture of connection and belonging.
• Empower with accountability. We trust each other to own and deliver on common goals.